The Watson Health collaborative aims to extract insights from unstructured data and other sources to address breast, lung, and other cancers; diabetes; eye health; brain disease; and heart disease.
Some academic medical centers and ambulatory radiology providers are joining forces with the healthcare imaging industry to apply IBM's Watson technology toward creating more effective imaging services and reduce the amount of unnecessary imaging.
Pulling data from EHRs, radiology and pathology reports, clinical guidelines, lab results, medical journals and other outcome studies, the Watson Health collaborative, announced Wednesday, aims to extract insights from unstructured imaging data, combined with data from other sources.
The founding academic medical centers in the effort are UC San Diego Health, Eastern Virginia Medical School, University of Miami Health System, and University of Vermont Health Network.
Other participating health systems are Baptist Health South Florida, Sentara Healthcare, and Sheridan Healthcare, a physician management group.
IBM's Watson technology uses cognitive computing to analyze vast quantities of data and provide insight to clinicians. The imaging collaborative aims to help doctors address breast, lung, and other cancers; diabetes; eye health; brain disease; and heart disease and related conditions, such as stroke.
Members of the collaborative could train Watson to detect commonly overlooked heart health conditions such as congestive heart failure or heart attack.
IBM says participants could train and score a coronary angiogram for physician review to detect early heart disease. The company is encouraging ophthalmologists in the cooperative to use Watson to help detect diabetic retinopathy and common eye diseases.
The medical imaging cooperative follows efforts by IBM to promote the use of Watson among diverse settings such as oncology and matching patients to clinical trials for a variety of disease states.
Radiology-specific participants of the collaborative are Radiology Associates of South Florida and vRad, a teleradiology company owned by the publicly-traded company Mednax.
Industry participants include Agfa HealthCare, Hologic, ifa systems AG, inoveon, Topcon, and Merge Healthcare, an IBM company.